


If Gold Rusts...

by ulexite



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Co-dependence, Dean Winchester in Denial, Dean Winchester is Obsessed with Sam Winchester, Demon Dean Winchester, First Time, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Intimacy, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Mark of Cain, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Demon Dean Winchester, Rating May Change, Sam Winchester Has PTSD, Seasons 9 - 11, Sexual Content, Sibling Incest, Temporary Character Death, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 00:13:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29892687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ulexite/pseuds/ulexite
Summary: What he wants from Sam isn’t wrong, not exactly, but it rests at the precipice of wrongness, one gentle nudge might send him over and beyond. He only wants to live their lives ensnared by each other, half-feral as they’ve always been, in want of nothing and no one else and owing nothing to the world. He’s ready to risk letting it all burn if it means he can hold onto Sam a little longer. He’s never bothered asking why.(except now time and circumstance forces Dean to recognize he's in love with his brother)
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 16
Kudos: 34





	1. Part I: Precious Burden

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m of the opinion that Canon Dean is obsessed, if not outright in love with Sam, and maybe doesn’t quite realize it. I don’t have anyone to talk to about this specific theory of mine, thus this fic was born.
> 
> I haven’t used any warnings because I don’t think they apply in the context I’d usually use them in. For every chapter I’ll mention new factors that might affect some readers’ enjoyment.
> 
> * Sam’s history of sexual abuse / losing autonomy is an undercurrent theme of this fic, referenced and implied by Dean who is sort of uncomfortable knowing about it and in denial of it.
> 
> ** Dean is bearing the Mark of Cain for a portion of this fic and some of his thoughts and feelings during that time, particularly toward Sam, are graphic and potentially disturbing.

Fate’s given more to Dean Winchester than he ever thought it might.

It’s taken a lot more from him, too.

It took his life young, which he expected; took it more than once, which he wasn’t prepared for. He didn’t plan ahead for spending the better part of a decade or two riding a see-saw with The Reaper. Once and done he’d figured, no better a deal than anybody else ever got, even hedged a bet with his Old Man he’d make it to twenty-eight but not thirty.

The most painful gift, his most precious burden, a beating heart in his passenger seat named Sam. Fate granted him one wish, that his brother would be by his side come what may. Sometimes it even convinced him it made everything else worth it, no price too steep, no suffering too painful.

“Look after your brother,” John Winchester hammered into his brain until the mantra carved its own grooves into his grey matter. That was their method, a way of saying goodbye so rote it was only an obligation in the end. _Of course_ he’d look after Sam, wasn’t even a question, no matter whether their daddy asked him to or not. But those orders are years old and the authority long gone stale, and it feels like the boys they were and the men they’ve become are worlds apart. He looks at Sammy and there’s something off in the way he does it, something that writhes and feeds on the decay of lies and betrayals, and another creature alongside it, a brother emotion that coils around Sam like it can possess him if it wraps him up tight enough.

It’s not a fair comparison to make, but he knows on a soul-deep level how wives can stand to forgive the husbands that beat them, how sons and daughters can hold the hand of a terminal parent even if that same hand struck them from innocence to adulthood. Sam has hurt him and disappointed him and taken so much from him, probably more than anyone else.

And he, in return, has done exactly the same. Scraping the bottom of each other’s wells until all that remains are the indelible dregs, no more to offer than what’s already been taken, nothing but the worst parts of themselves nobody else could swallow. An exchange of poisons that they gladly accept.

Because Sam has also healed him, made him proud, and given up so much just to stay by his side. Sacrificed so much to keep them relatively whole, protecting the ‘us’ that is always stretching its neck under the guillotine.

The simple truth is that he loves Sam so much, there’s never been anyone in his life who could compare or even come close. He used to think the words ‘I need you’ were empty, manipulative, selfish to the core, the weakest words a person could offer. If that’s the case then call him weak, call him selfish, accuse him of anything and he’ll say it’s true. He can’t survive without Sam, he’s not above saying or doing what needs to be said and done to keep his brother with him, not even if it only hurts them in the end.

Because the truest truth yet is that fate is changeable and vindictive, and for all that it gave him Sam in the first place, it could just as easily and ruthlessly take him away.

.:.

He keeps tensing when Sam’s close, or touching him, or absently staring his way mired in thought. Sometimes it happens when he walks into a room and finds Sam there. He’s caught off-guard by the broad landscape of his brother’s back bowed over as he researches or dozes on the X of his arms, he wonders at the logistics of such overly-long legs when they’re stretched out and relaxed, hesitant about little flashes of at-ease skin he’s not yet used to like bare bony feet.

The more he thinks about it, gnawing on this strangeness within himself, he thinks it might’ve always been this way. The only other time his body pulls this shit is when he picks up the traces of a monster in their midst. It’s a scent that doesn’t register, a seventh or eighth sense that hasn’t been named yet, a primal knowing that he’s in danger and he needs to run or prepare to fight for his life. His hindbrain used to know better than the rest of him that he’s not built like an apex predator, tens of thousands of years of DNA patterned to remind him it’s a kill or be killed kinda world, eat or be eaten, fuck or be fucked. It’s coded into their helix to first recognize that they’re food to anything higher up on the chain, and to then fight the natural order with their every waking breath.

Sam’s dangerous, that’s what this feeling must mean. If it weren’t for this parasite burrowing into his skin Sammy might’ve even been more dangerous than him. There’s sulfur in his blood, made him grow up big and strong, but it doesn’t mean anything really. Dean’s not that fond of planes either, but the hairs rising on the nape of his neck when he’s at inhuman altitudes doesn’t mean he’s gonna throw himself out the emergency exit. Sam might be a little vengeful, a little easier to drag dark side (gunning down Jake with cold eyes, justifying letting Ruby rip out Nancy the Virgin’s beating heart, chugging demon blood like a stranded man dying of thirst, always trying to get away from Dean like that isn’t the cruelest thing he could do) but forsaken as he is by this curse Dean knows he’ll wind up the savage, the further unhinged. Deal or no deal, Dean'd been hell-bound from the start, and he can’t blame demon blood for that now, can he? Can hardly blame the Mark if it only strikes against his own bloodthirsty filaments.

It doesn’t make much sense how Sam at his most unguarded sets his teeth on edge like this, but maybe it’s like seeing a mountain lion curling up on his front porch – like, what the fuck is he supposed to do? Feed it? Pet it? Let it hang around until it’s three-days-starving and tries to take a bite out of him? – so yeah, maybe it’s like that, seeing Sam settling into what might very well be permanence with him is just- it’s everything he wanted, it’s the _only_ thing he ever wanted, and now that it’s happening it’s disturbing him.

Sam is dangerous, for monsters and especially for Dean. If he goes and taps-out on his ambitions to be a real boy, if he concedes to Dean and takes his place here where he ought to be, it’ll be the sweetest fucking victory in the world. And maybe one day Sam will get some fight back in him and try to leave, and Dean won’t be strong enough to let him, won’t survive if Sam doesn’t give him a say in the matter. Until then, Dean’ll just have to hold his breath and try to not spook his brother.

The Mark of Cain throbs, violent and mocking. _Easier said than done,_ he thinks.

He finds Sam asleep in the library, slumped and contorted on a wingback armchair, chin up and head craned back, mouth open and relaxed. His feet are up on a little cushioned stool, crossed at the ankles and bare. In his lap is an open book with tea-brown pages written in Latin, fingers splayed over vintage illustrations of some demonic creature or another. Sam’s hair has fallen back and left his face surrendered to the dim lamplight and Dean just freezes… watches him breathe… and he…

His heart feels too small for the amount of blood trying to squeeze through it, something right on the edge of pain seizing his chest while he looks upon his sleeping little brother. Dean draws his hand up in front of Sam’s mouth, feels his warm breath passing through the gaps of his fingers, so alive. He hasn’t forgotten what a miracle that is, not now they’re knocking off lives like metaphorical cats, how the next one might very well be their ninth goodnight. All the more horrifying, the impulse that travels from the burning Mark down and down until he seriously considers jamming his fingers inside Sam’s throat and ripping out his tongue-

Fingers clenched, resisting, but now the inspiration lies in the column of Sam’s long neck, how easily he could crush that trachea…

Even more bizarre, and barely less terrifying, the thought that twitches to the forefront about resting his thumb against Sam’s teeth, his lower lip, just pressing it there, feeling the spit-slick skin inside his mouth and that hot breath puffing across his knuckles – would Sam’s teeth close gently on his thumbnail? (would his tongue touch what’s captured between?)

He cups Sam’s cheek instead, calling softly in a tone meant for children and wild things, “Sammy, hey, Sammy c’mon, wake up for me,” while shifting his hold to the nape of his brother’s crooked neck to straighten him up properly. The Mark stays quiet and resentful.

Sam sucks in a deep and sudden breath, his eyes flick open wide and aware and, upon recognizing Dean, squint against the light as his muscles soften and he rests heavily against Dean’s palm. “Hey,” he rasps, then clears his throat. The sound is deep and loud and it shocks through Dean like static; he pulls away quickly. “Sorry, didn’t mean to pass out,” his brother says, always apologizing for something these days.

“You’re fine. Staying here or going to bed?”

Sam blearily considers him, the room around them, the book in his lap with the inky maw which he closes on his thumb. “I’ll prob’ly wake up inna minute, might’s well stay here.”

“Sure, Sammy,” he accepts. He picks a book off the top of Sam’s stack and makes himself comfortable in the neighboring chair, thumbing through it for show. Sam’s eyes hang open on him while he settles in too. Dean waits and watches while they fight closing until Sam succumbs to sleep again, a little less bent out of shape than before, perfectly relaxed in his company. Dean closes his eyes and readies himself for an uncomfortable night, compelled by a familiar unease at the thought of leaving Sam out here alone until morning, and yeah maybe he misses certain things. Sam’s breath, living and present, always in earshot all those years for most of their lives, just three feet away where Dean could see him and smell him and hear him and – if he’d needed, touch and taste, but he’d never needed those things – and so what if part of the satisfaction of the hunt is retiring to their motel rooms after? Blood and sweat and iodine, two queens and a bottle of whisky with two people’s spit on the rim, a patch of sketchy carpet and bedside table between. He never slept a wink in all his forty years in Hell, but maybe he would’ve if Sam had been there with him.

Sam may have danger chemically burned into his veins but Dean has always been the kind of person who slept better with a loaded gun under his pillow.

.:.

They’ve never been as harmonious as Dean would’ve liked. Always needing a re-sync, one or the other low on gas and in desperate want of a tune-up they weren’t ever gonna get. Something always hung befouled between them like roadkill guts stuck up under his grill where he can’t quite reach it. “If you looked after yer melon the way you look after that car,” Bobby insinuated way back when, but it’s not like he can just go on some back-alley Ebay and order custom parts for all his and Sam’s broken bits.

Or, well, maybe he can, but he shouldn’t. Won’t. _Why not?_

“Whatever the magic pill is, I’ll take it too,” Sam had said to him once, beseeching Dean to see reason in his madness, begging to be let alone to harvest an illusion of immortality from their creature feature of the week. He thinks about this conversation sometimes, when Sam lies through his teeth about not doing whatever it takes to keep Dean alive like they haven’t had this argument so many times over the years. Like Dean hasn’t had to be the one to tell Sam no.

The sediment of Gadreel has settled between them, but it’s left their waters brackish, unsustainable. It doesn’t take much to stir it back up again where it hangs in a murky cloud between them, lingering until they forget about it long enough it comes to rest a while. It’s a problem that just won’t dissolve by its own damn self. Sam will never forgive him if he doesn’t apologize, but Dean will never be sorry enough to ask him for forgiveness. He did what he did and Sam’s alive because of him.

Sam, when he used to bring it up daily, fishing for understanding while offering none of his own, would always inevitably come back to the word consent. The slimier Sam tried to make him feel about it, the harder he fought whatever trickle of guilt his naïve little brother tried to wring out of him. It wouldn’t take a genius to put two and two together, summing up that Sam's acting like a rape victim because he is one. He hasn’t let himself dwell on that ever, couldn’t let it sit and fester in his mind too long at a time or he’d need to pry, he’d shuck Sam’s brain like an oyster and make his baby brother tell him all kinds of things well before he’s ready – if he’s ever ready – and he’d cut both of them up with Sam’s rawest sharpest edges in the process. They’d never heal from that, so he left it alone and deliberately hasn’t thought about it.

Except when Sam _makes_ him think about it, accusations that make it seem like he thinks Dean’s on par with whoever tore open the wound of consent in the first place. He’s wrong for denying his little brother closure but he just can’t bring himself to feel like saving Sam’s life was exploiting him. He won’t lump himself in with the others and neither should Sam.

Stubborn Sammy, who may not flinch from Dean except when his eyes get that feverish glaze, when his red right hand spills more blood – never enough blood – _need more_. He might even touch Dean, wary like he feels unwelcome to even exist in his brother’s space, relaxing as soon as he knows for sure Dean’s not having a bad day and he’s allowed to get closer. He doesn’t outwardly treat Dean like someone he doesn’t trust, but they’ve fallen out of alignment and Sam’s the squeaky wheel. Dean wishes, urgently, desperately, that Sam would just _get over it_. They don’t have time to be this way.

He throws himself down on his newest on a lifelong carousel of motel beds, inexplicably wide awake and electric under his skin, and he asks, “Sammy, you ever think about if I never came for you at Stanford?”

“Dean,” Sam says. His tone is withered and uncomfortable like he’s been reminded of some old bones they’d put to rest long ago, and here Dean is digging it up just to poke something that hurts. “You know I don’t.”

It’s not that hard to find Sam’s bruises when the bruises are all over him and easy to reach. He starts toeing off his boots, left one first, and flicks it off in Sam’s direction. “Yeah, you do,” he disagrees, a serene feeling washed over him, knowing that it’ll bother his brother more if he’s nonchalant about it. He kicks his other boot off and this time Sam catches it.

“Fine, yeah Dean, I do. And you know what? It doesn’t matter.” He can feel Sam moving around the room and looks down the length of his body to watch his brother arranging their shoes at the ends of their beds.

“Doesn’t matter, huh?”

“Why would it?”

“A lot of crap’s happened to you since and it’s all ‘cause of me, right?”

“When have I ever said that?”

Dean looks up at the ceiling, at the tendrils of a dusty old cobweb floating around the light fixture, at the faint speckling of mold above the curtain rod and by the bathroom door. Whatever detergent they used to clean the sheets, _if_ they cleaned the sheets, he can’t say he likes the smell of it, cheap and reminiscent of mildew. “I don’t think you need to say it, Sam. This wasn’t the life you wanted.”

“And now it is,” Sam says, and it has that same kind of paternal finality to it Dean was used to hearing from Dad, the same one he’s used to using on Sam when he’s tired of his bitching. Dean lets him have his moment, can almost count down to the second Sam comes back for a second go. “You didn’t kill my girlfriend, Dean. Who do you think I would’ve called when I woke up one night to my whole apartment on fire? You think I would’ve, what, picked a new girl, a new home, pretended it didn’t happen? What about when I started having visions, or when I woke up in Cold Oak? I was always going to find my own way right back here.”

“Not without being pushed.”

He feels the weight of Sam observing him for a tense moment before the end of his bed jolts from a small kick. “What’s this all about? Why are you hitting menopause all of a sudden?”

Dean doesn’t know himself, really. He’s just fucked up with all of these bad feelings and Sam happens to be here to take them out on in some ultimately self-flagellating way. What hurts Sam hurts him, he's doing this to himself really.

“You’ve never been happy being with me,” he says after a minute that feels like an hour, putting words to a feeling he’s always had and slotting a piece of his own self back into place. _Oh,_ he thinks, _that’s what that gap was for._

“Dean,” Sam starts, “ _you’re_ never happy being with _me_.”

It’s true and it’s false and Dean doesn’t want to think about that right now, he’s busy. “You wanted to be a lawyer, you wanted to get married and have kids and like, forty years of debt and an electric car and family portraits and anniversaries and shit. You’ve got what, bad diner food, we live underground, our best friend’s an angel who’s either trying to kill us or screwing up the world with cosmic tripe, you spend all your fricking time with _me_. Sam, you’ll be lucky to get laid once every ten years-”

“I don’t care about that.”

The Mark flares, hot and bright, a prickling sensation creeping over the backs of his arms and up his neck. He looks Sam dead in the eye and sees his brother lean away from him, mind-to-mouth as the dreadful words “Because of Lucifer?” slither out, sensual and underbelly-smooth on his tongue. The satisfaction’s insidious.

Sam doesn’t quite cower, but his eyes sink down and away, and his expression just kind of… drops. It’s sadness but that’s not all it is, a spiritual greying of the eyes like something dying right in front of him, and Sam’s mouth shrinks tight around whatever words or sounds would follow a pain like that. An ache blooms right in Dean’s gut and he throws himself upright, reaching a hand out across the divide well before he was even on his feet where he could possibly reach-

-Sam flinches, he _flinches_ -

-Dean stops, holds himself at bay, him and this curse on his arm that provoked him to say something aloud he never should’ve been thinking in the first place. Sam’s glistening gaze centers on his chest, struggles and fails to rise up to meet him; Dean knows Sam can see how quick and anxious his breath has become. _I’m sorry,_ he thinks, _it was an accident, I’m so sorry._ What he says is “Sam, _Sammy_ ,” but it means the same thing.

“Gotta take a piss,” Sam shrugs it – him – off, and with the stiffest stride he’s ever seen that wasn’t nursing some break or sprain, promptly vanishes into the motel bathroom. The lock engages, a faint metallic _snick_. Sam doesn’t come back out for over an hour but Dean waits for him with his head in his hands, restless knees and blood caught under his nails from scratching at his own right arm.

Three days later, banged up and perfumed with grave smoke, they’re heading home and Sam asks him, “Did you know or was it just a lucky guess?”

“It… look, Sam…”

“Nevermind,” his brother mumbles, still staring vacantly out the Impala’s passenger window. Dean can hardly see his face but he knows it’s _that_ look again.

It takes a few minutes to make his mouth work with his brain. “If you want to talk-”

“I don’t,” Sam interrupts.

“Okay, but if you ever-”

“I won’t.”

“Why not?”

 _It’s a fair question,_ he thinks. Sam’s always trying to get him to talk about their feelings or whatever, always was the sweet one, always trying to be gentle because most of the time he believes what everyone else has told him: that he’s the exact opposite of that. Sammy’s always fighting uphill to be good.

Sam finally answers him. “Because nothing you’ll say to me will make it any better, Dean, you’ll only make it worse.” The words sound kind of rehearsed, like this is an argument he’s been having in his head for the past three days while trying to figure out how best to tell Dean to back off. Unaware, obviously, that there’s nothing Dean would rather do than leave this alone. “Some things can’t just… I can’t get over everything just because it’ll make it easier, or because you want me to. Whatever opinion you have about it, or about me dealing with it, keep it to yourself.”

The Mark is blessedly quiet, satisfied perhaps with the chaos it’s already caused. “I didn’t mean to bring it up,” he admits, the softest voice he can manage.

“Well, you did.”

“Yeah. I know.”

It’s the perfect time for an apology. For this, for Gadreel, for dragging Sammy out of his apple pie life all those years ago and shoving him in the Impala and driving off with him into a sunset of blood and hellfire. Even just a wishy-washy comment about all Sam’s gone through, a little bit of pity even if it rankles, just saying he understands where his brother is coming from even if he’s still not truly sorry. At this point, some Hallmark ‘my deepest sympathies’ or ‘thoughts and prayers’ card might be better than stonewalling his own brother. Again.

Dean drives them halfway to Lebanon before he says another word, and it’s only to ask if Sam’s hungry. Sam says no. Dean keeps his guilt to himself like always, tucked away between the shadow and the soul.

.:.

There’s an intangible war spilling out into the streets. He sees tragedy hunched over in every alley and cowering in every storm drain. There’s blood in the cracked pavement underfoot and nobody bothers with it. The rain will wash it away, it’ll be back again within the week. As long ago as Dean can remember he’s been at war, and for as far back as his memory reaches humankind has let itself be led to the edge of annihilation.

An exaggeration, he knows this now, but damn did his daddy ever make him believe his every bullet shot forth into evil was the one bullet that mattered most. He’s not sure he ever questioned it before he was ordered to kill _Sam_ if and when.

Their father wasn’t a bad man except when he forgot he was supposed to be good. A lot of bad habits, a man built on vices and rage. Never could leave Dean’s name out of his mouth when he fought with Sam. “If we don’t do this how many people will die, Sam?! How many deaths are you willing to have on your conscience- on _Dean’s_ conscience?” His name, one syllable formed on stinking ethylic breath, the sharpest needle of all. John Winchester was the first person to use them against each other like that, he patented using their bond as a weapon, just two more polished blades in his arsenal. The world followed suit, punishing them for a weakness born from a lifetime of neglect interspersed with the kind of abuse that he still hesitates to call abuse, things he outwardly masks with excuses and claiming Dad was a hero.

Dean, forever stuck in the middle, loyal to Dad and loyal to Sam, punished by his brother and rewarded by his father for his effort to remain neutral. Oh but John Winchester made his blood run like fluent fire in his veins too, decades past the war between Evil and Humanity that was really the war between Evil and John Winchester. Age has given him a better perspective.

Their daddy didn’t know what it meant to be at war with all of Evil, he didn’t know what it meant to have your fate chartered by Angels and bartered over by the next big thing trying to make a name for itself in Hell. John Winchester was shuffled around like a chess piece, no better than the rest of them. He wasn’t leading the charge, he was being led, tailed Azazel for twenty years before it killed him. Dean has the King of Hell’s phone number, you know, just in case he needs to make a bad decision today. He used to think they were so similar, he and Sam and their father, but John Winchester would _never_ do half the things Dean has done, wouldn’t even entertain the thought. John Winchester would've left Sam dead where he lay in Cold Oak, salted his body and left it burning within the hour just to be done with it.

For years everything around them has been escalating past the senseless violence of animals, beyond the predatory instincts of godless creatures. They’re playing political games with angels and demons and they’re letting smaller monsters go to leave room for the bigger ones, everything is coordinated and nothing makes sense anymore. Fifth-generation werewolves and monster crime syndicates, angels beating each other to death with their fists because God abandoned them to rot.

And through it all, so many years of fighting and failing, the underlying thread of panic has wound tighter around his heart. Where the hell is all of this crap leading? What’s going to happen to their planet now that it’s a battleground? And the people, _the people_ , scurrying around by and by their business, completely unaware the way a hive of insects might be unaware of a forest fire before it consumes them.

Dean’s bones ache with old breaks, his skin twinges with new scars and pinched nerves and sprains in places he didn’t think could sprain, but his body doesn’t carry the full weight of what he’s seen, what he’s felt – sometimes he looks at Sammy and his stomach flips over, and all he can think about is how one day – soon, probably – one or both of them will die, and it’ll be permanent this time, and they’ll never see each other again. Because they’re at war, and they have no choice, they have to keep fighting while humanity keeps on obliviously trudging towards extinction.

He casts his eyes over the city streets now, away from the blood in the pavement and toward the crosswalk where too many people are looking down and not up. Frogs in water set to boil, the whole lot of them, a plague upon the earth. They have no fucking clue, and Dean does, but that doesn’t make him enriched. It’s driving him insane, all this uncertainty in his life where the only thing that _is_ certain is Sam.

Sam, and the death knell waiting to ring for them both when the battle is inevitably lost.

.:.

Sam passes him by in the hall. The Mark of Cain tingles, his tendons twitch. By no command of his own his fingers close around the bottom hem of Sam’s shirt, and of course he doesn’t let go now that he’s got a grip on him – white-knuckled and perturbed, cast in amber in this petrified state of suspense. Sam stops, stalled by the tug on the back of his shirt, and waits to see what Dean means to do with him, flicking his uncertain gaze to the raised welt glowing red raw on Dean’s skin like an infection.

No, not _like_ – it _is_ an infection.

Cain and Abel, Dean and Sam. Life is a passage of time through a hall of mirrors, warping, reflecting, repeating the same tired old story over and over again. Fitting that Sam lies about not being wary of him, still trying to play the role of the good brother no matter how many times God, the Devil, or anyone else tells him to read his lines.

Dean, on the other hand, can feel his strings being pulled and he goes with it. What else is he supposed to do? He doesn’t have intentions, he has impulses. The Mark makes him a wildcard, not even he knows what he’ll do next, he just knows it’s exactly what he’s supposed to. There’s a reason they were chosen for this.

There’s a reason he grabbed Sam and hasn’t let go of him yet.

He feels like the indoor cat that caught its first mouse and doesn’t know what to do with it, Sam gone still in his claws, one wrong move and he’ll remember to bite down.

“You hungry?” Sam asks all of a sudden, apropos of nothing- “Was gonna rustle up something to eat.” He probably wasn’t.

Dean’s stomach is empty but the twisting he feels isn’t hunger – or at least, it’s a hunger of a different kind, a thirst even. He sees how the vein in Sam’s neck flutters, frantic palpitations of the heart. The tang he tastes at the back of his tongue is fear, he knows not whose.

“Better not be none of that Gandhi nonsense, I’m not waiting around for you to sweet-talk the potatoes before you peel ‘em.”

“Dean.”

“Graze all you want, Sammy, but I’m the hunter and you’re the gatherer in this relationship. A man needs his meat.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Sam tells him, tugging his shirt free of Dean’s unrelenting fist, tossing his hair to hide the way he rolls his tense shoulders on his way to the galley. Dean’s feet turn to follow without conscious thought, stalking his brother’s heels.

“Get it? ‘Cause of the two of us you’re clearly the girl-” as soon as he says it, he regrets it.

“One day I’m gonna find a spell that’ll turn you into a woman for a day,” Sam threatens him, voice gone echoey and unfeeling.

“Awesome, free tits,” Dean says to recharge the joking vibe. There’s a wincing feeling in his gut telling him Sam is still uncomfortable around him, not that he blames his brother. He crossed a bold line, Mark’s influence or not, and that’s on him, but they’ve hardly talked in the near two weeks since their last hunt and it’s eating Dean alive.

Sam stops dead upon entering their kitchen and Dean nearly walks right into the solid mass of him.

Sam chucks him back a put-upon bitchface and waffles around for almost a minute before he commits to feeding them both. Dean perches his ass on a stool and watches his brother, drinking his fill through his eyes alone. Sam’s relaxed now that Dean’s not touching him but he seems completely aware of his audience, every movement deliberate and slow like a prey animal taking a risk by carrying on with its business. In a way that must be exactly what the Mark wanted, noticing the pangs in his hollow gut abate with every hint of Sammy’s attention on him. He had been starving, not for food or water or blood, hungry nonetheless.

Sammy’s eyes latch with his; for a while they just look at one another and their connection sustains him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was meant to be a one-shot but it’s too long so I’m breaking it into parts.
> 
> Thanks for taking the time to read!


	2. Just

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I initially said I didn't want to rate this explicit, but there's a chance it might bump up by the end of the fic. Also, the final chapter count is subject to change!
> 
> *canon temporary character death

Sam wakes himself, Dean, and probably every other patron of the motel with his hollering.

It’s just shy of two in the morning. Sam follows him out to the ice machine while barely dressed, what few clothes he is wearing threadbare and patchy with sweat. The ice machine crunches and clunks like they’re offending it by asking it to do its job. Half of Sam’s face is a dramatic pink from the Motel neon, bleeding into the sodium gold cast off the streetlights, highlighting the sickly sheen that returns however many times he tries to wipe it off on his shirt. Life flickers like summer fireflies in the rooms around them, curtains raise in inquisitive corners before resettling. Dean scoops ice into a dented wine bucket and keeps the corner of his eye on Sam while he shivers and rocks from foot to foot, gaze lost out over the dormant lot with his hands scrunched into his pits, sniffling because of the chilly night and nothing else obviously.

Back in their room Dean folds a fistful of ice into a handtowel and presses it to the back of his little brother’s fevered neck. This time, when he asks Sam if he wants to talk, he gets the shock of his life when the answer is yes.

He finds out all about how sometimes Lucifer would crack Sam’s bones and drink the marrow while he watched; how he’d been drowned and revived and drowned and revived for a relentless month of momentary deaths; how one of Michael’s favorite things to do to him was let him choose who gets to suffer: him, or Adam. How sometimes Sam begged for it to be Adam.

To keep his brother talking Dean confesses one of his own, that even after all this time he sometimes curls his fingers and toes just to remind himself they’re still attached and accounted for, how the feeling of meat caught between the seams of his teeth still disturbs him after being forced to swallow parts of himself day after day.

He thought it might open them both up if they just put something on the table to bet with, thought Sam might understand he’s willing to listen now and he should cash in on that. Sure he’s a few years late to this pity party, but it’s something, right?

Sam gives him a wan smile and moves the icy handtowel to the side of his face, closed eyes and long breaths, doesn’t say another word about Lucifer or the Cage or what happened to him there. Sam ignores Dean and Dean basks in Sam, and in short time the ice starts to melt, running down Sam’s forearm in clear veins while he keeps on breathing, pressing his face into the cold.

The Hell that Dean recalls was a scorched wasteland. Years free of it and his mouth is still parched, eyes dry and itching from burning sulfur rain; he’s not sure Sam’s even noticed how carefully Dean picks their hunts well away from any desert. He’d known the theories, that the deeper you go the closer you get to the frozen tundra. He’s never wondered before now whether Sam was treated to fire or ice, more likely the Devil invoked both.

They go out for an early breakfast – neither of them was getting back to sleep so screw it – and Sam’s overall demeanor today is kind of haunted. Even their waitress notices, scanning her eyes over Sam two or three times more than necessary. Sam doesn’t even pick up on the extra attention, far away in some other place or time that’s not here with Dean and their four missing women and the bluest diner he’s ever seen. It’s a stone-cold fixation that passes for deep thought, something that probably has some fancy word or acronym, costly chemical intervention, and self-help books that’d do jack shit to actually help.

“You good?” Dean asks once their waitress dismisses herself for a few minutes. “Hey, Sam,” he says and reaches across the tabletop to take Sam’s wrist and drag him back down to earth.

Sam jerks in his seat and fixes his stare on Dean’s hand and his own wrist like it’s some abstract painting that doesn’t make sense. He flexes his fingers, stretches and curls them, and strangely he relaxes in inches while Dean keeps touching him. _He’s reminding himself they’re still there_ , he realizes, watching Sam tap his fingers together like he’s counting each one.

He idly recalls Lisa pushing him onto antidepressants; he’d listened because good pseudo-husbands listen to their pseudo-wives, but his brain turned to thick soup like a wraith kept spiking him with venom right above the axis – dosage: ONCE daily with food. For the first two days he barely slept, restless and paranoid, pupils unshrinking even in direct light. He wasn’t done grieving but the pills made it hard to feel as shitty as he was supposed to feel, yet within the week he caught himself contemplating his own gun too many times to pass it off as ideation. So he stopped before he really started, and it really was a shame. If he thought meds would help he might’ve pulled a Jamie Spears on his brother and loaded him up to the gills years ago, but he knows for a fact it ain’t worth trying, not going to help people like them if they can’t even be honest with the doctors trying to glue them back together. That way be institutions and misdiagnosis and committing felonies trying to reverse-51-50 his nutty baby brother.

Dean clears his throat when their waitress returns, nothing subtle about a man having to draw his limbs back to his own side of the booth. She looks between them like they’re either two shy children with something to hide or like she’s trying to figure out which one’s the wife. When Sam kicks his ankle he’s only seventy-percent sure it’s an accident. “Two coffees, black, special for me, and whatever that grilled chicken salad thing is for him, thanks hon,” he orders, keeping his tone consciously low. _You are kinda butch,_ a distant memory of Sam taunts from the sidelines.

It’s a pinch to the heart when Sam’s lips start to perk up into a vague smirk. “What was the line,” he says, and in that specific mocking voice he makes when he quotes Dean to Dean, “ _I get all tingly when you take control like that._ ”

Well, he’s wide awake now, doesn’t even need the fucking coffee. “Jesus Christ, Sammy. What the hell?” Had he ever said that? It sounds like something he’d say, but he can’t recall the time or place.

Sam coughs around a little laugh and the waitress awkwardly hovers a second longer before leaving. The Mark isn’t trying to tell him anything but he can feel it pressing down, a heavy bracelet reminding Dean it's still here and grounding him as effectively as he’d grounded his brother. _Not now dammit,_ he begs like it gives a shit if Dean doesn’t want to say or do anything that’ll wipe that little grin off his brother’s face.

“Your boyfriend’s lookin’ a little better now,” their waitress tells him when she comes to refill their coffees and Sam’s in the restroom coiffing his hair. She swivels her head warily like she was waiting for his other half to leave before she said anything.

Nowadays he doesn’t even correct people who perceive them as a couple, or if he does it’s not with the vitriol of his youth. Partly mellowing with age and circumstance, and partly Sam’s influence after telling him “you know it’s actually a good thing that two guys can get mistaken for being _together_.”

“But we don’t even look like a couple,” he'd complained. Sam’d had that look about him like he’d been about to argue with something reasonable and Dean had put a finger out and told him to “shut it” but Sam had smiled patiently then disobeyed him.

“Sure it’s awkward, but nobody’s gonna turn us out for the night if we correct them. Imagine having to tell every stranger you’re relying on for something that this person is actually your partner, and having that be the thing that gets thrown in your face? What’s annoying for us might be damaging to someone else on the other side of things.”

And god but Sam’d been so damn earnest about it, he’d had to take a few moments just to dwell on that. He thinks about how many times he’s mistaken gay couples for friends but he can’t remember Sam ever having that problem. He thinks about how Sam never seems to share his knee-jerk surprise when they pass two attractive women holding hands, how he pauses to re-calibrate but never laughs or leers or so much as twitches. The only time he’s seen Sam do a double-take on a same-sex couple had been while he was still raw from Jess, and he’d looked at those guys funny enough that Dean led him away just in case he said something – now he’s thinking about it, of course it was the ‘happy couple’ thing that stalled him in his tracks, not the ‘gay’ thing. Never was. There’s an awareness in the back of his mind that he never pays all that much attention to, he knows it’s there and he knows Sam knows he suspects. It’s all inconsequential now and Dean blames Hell.

Anyway, it seems to make Sam happy that he’s filed down his ego enough to not overreact to little things. When Dean corrects he does it gently, and to acknowledge their own brand of weirdness “we’re just brothers” has dropped the ‘just’. There is no ‘just’ between them, ‘just’ is for other people, less-important relationships.

For whatever reason he lets it lie today and gives their waitress the reaction she wants. “He’s had a rough time of it, thanks for not saying anything to him. Appreciate it.”

“Of course,” she says, small-town sweetling pleased to be proven right, then promptly starts asking him what they’re doing in town like he’s her best fucking friend. She’s still there when Sam gets back, clutching her stack of laminated menus to her chest and smiling at Dean in a way that he might’ve mistaken for an invitation if he didn’t have any context.

Sam certainly mistook it. “Did you get her number?” He asks later that afternoon, a thready nonchalance he doesn’t buy for once second, the overly-curious little shit.

“Whose? The waitress? Barking up the wrong tree there, Sammy.”

“She had a boyfriend?”

“More like she thought I did,” he corrects.

The fitful fluttering of Sam’s eyelashes as he takes in Dean’s comment is really something else. “Was it ‘cause of what I said? So, you corrected her, right?”

Dean scoffs and starts rifling through his bag for his gun oil and cleaning kit. “‘Course not,” he says, and of course _now_ is the moment the Mark decides to get bitchy. “We’re basically fucking married, dude. Like I can get away from you long enough to have any real fun anyway.” He drops the oil and rag and the clothes scooped up in his other hand and presses both palms over his eyes, scrubbing at his sockets with the heels of his hands. “Shit, just ignore me.”

Sam lets out a sound kind of like he’d been holding his breath all day and finally released it. “Sure, whatever you want.”

It sucks, but at least it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it could’ve been, or what it has been. It bothers him a little that the precedent the Mark’s set, and what Sam’s accepted, is that his curse acts like a truth serum and that everything coming out of his mouth is already in his head somewhere. He’ll keep saying awful things at random, and Sam will keep believing they’re true for Dean deep down, and on the off chance this infernal brand is scrubbed from his skin Sam might never believe a kind word he says ever again.

He sets about cleaning his and Sam’s guns and lets his thoughts drift, anything to keep from trying to hold a conversation with Sam when the Mark’s this sensitive. Inevitably he falls back on the waitress, her unforced assumption the two of them were _together_ together, and how common and not-shocking that reaction is nowadays.

 _I mean, if Sam was my sister,_ he muses, and immediately shuts that thought down before it can go further than that.

The Mark prickles over this curious thing, makes him run the words over in his mind again. _If Sam was my sister_ , he repeats, slow and halting, waits for it…

 _… shit_.

He knows that feeling, low in his gut, fluttery like a crush, like anxiety that comes in ripples before it comes in waves. He peeks at the fantasy of it, and his sick fucking mind actually forms the thought into words that nearly ruin him.

_If Sam was my sister, we probably would’ve fucked by now._

Immediately nauseous, bile burning as it creeps higher into the back of his throat, all he can do is comfort himself with the reminder that Sam’s a guy, and he’s a guy, and they’ve never thought about each other like that. He’s just… acknowledging it, this thing other people keep pointing out to him, how weird they are, mistaking them for a couple, mistaking their intensity for sensuality. They’re so up each other’s asses it’s dysfunctional, of course they fucking know that. Hard to miss being co-dependent and completely lacking any drive to couple up with anyone else because why would they? Their souls already mated for life, they’ve already committed their ‘not even in death do us part’s and followed through on those vows unlike most people who take them in vain, but it’s still not like that.

Everyone tells them it’s unhealthy, twisted, insane, and they’re only looking from the outside in, don’t even know the half of it, but it’s just.

It's just not. Not _that._

He doesn’t know how to explain it even to himself, he couldn’t justify it to Bobby or Lisa when they pushed him on it. And trying to explain to Dad? He’s queasy just thinking about it, having to defend himself, _defend Sam_ , fighting people who are also his family for what they have even if his only answer to that is ‘he’s my brother’ and people keep staring at him and waiting for the ‘and’. How can he put it into words that Sam is everything to him, he neither wants nor needs anything else, and that maybe half of the reason they spend so much time hating each other is that they’re brothers and that’s where their connection ends?

There’s no rational resolution to this thing between them, nowhere for this fervor to go, nothing they can do to demonstrate it beyond flinging themselves in the face of mortal peril for each other. Not ‘just’ brothers, but not anything else either. In Dean’s mind there is no more to be since this is surely it for him; Sam is basically the love of his life and there’s no getting around that. If they weren’t brothers nobody would even question them, but they _are_ brothers. It’s the full-stop after that confuses everyone, especially when they’re at their worst and their knuckles are broken and their teeth are loose, yet he dares anybody to even try hating Sam a fraction as much as Dean’s allowed to hate him in those moments of bloodletting.

It’s not the way other people think it is when they shove it into a box that fits for them, domestics with rings on their fingers and a mortgage in their birth name, the ones that consider it their duty to King and Country to marry and reproduce. There’s none of that here, but he can see it from their perspective if he turns the thought in a different light to see how it changes color. If he frames it like Sam was a chick and he was his depraved self, it makes sense that maybe yeah, maybe they would’ve gotten those wires crossed too. Maybe he would’ve caught a sister looking at him too long and questioned things that never come to mind when his brother does it, maybe he would’ve thought ‘ _I wonder if she’d let me_ ’ and taken a chance at the slightest provocation. If he’s twisted enough to think it he’s probably twisted enough to do it. There have been days when he was exactly the sort of asshole who’d crawl into a sister’s bed if he thought he’d get away with it.

_Dad always did say all it takes to make a man a beast is a little hard liquor and the dark of night. One for the courage and one for the alibi._

But this, them, it isn’t some Lannister bullshit. Too many wires would need to be crossed for him to think of Sam like that. It’s a cold comfort, a comfort nonetheless, that he has it in him to be that sick but at least he isn’t there yet. It’s a seed that would never take root, so he thanks whoever’s fucking listening that Sam is his brother.

Sam, who brings him a double-bacon cheeseburger and a slice of cherry pie for dinner. He shoves the food at Dean and drags the cleaning kit towards himself and takes over for a while, mouth shut but eyes magnetic on the flash of Dean’s right arm where his rolled sleeve halves the biblical violence embossed onto his skin. That kind of attention lights the Mark ablaze, setting off a feedback loop of deadly intention and other hateful things. He has to bite his tongue a couple of times to keep the Mark’s escalating malevolence to himself.

Yes, what a relief that Sam’s his brother.

.:.

There was an instance where seventeen-year-old Sam picked gravel out of the palms of his hands. Dean remembers even now how he’d pressed his own fingernails into his flesh to mimic his brother’s marks, too blunt to draw blood but just enough to hurt. He used to do that to remind himself when Sam’s pain was his fault.

Bobby and their dad were howling mad at one another, splitting their friendship at the seams. Bobby insisted on Sam staying with him to finish out his last year of school, kept being told in evermore colorful variations there wasn’t a chance in hell of that happening. The _kids_ were staying out of it, but drunken men know no boundaries.

Dean had taken Sam’s hands in his own, thumbed over his skin, the congealing blood smeared into the lines of his fingers and palms, all the new divots the rocks had made. He’d stared at Sam’s hands hard, wondering abstractly what a palm reader might’ve seen written into his skin after years of toiling, if there was a way of making sense of them beneath the burns and scars anymore or if it was reduced to gibberish. _Oh, you poor child._

His fingers had found Sam’s broken heart lines and stayed there.

“Keep this up, Winchester, your boys ain’t gon’ live long enough ta give you no grandbabies.”

John Winchester had looked upon his sons that day, hashed by the light of Bobby’s kitchen blinds, twisting around one another like vines sprouted too close together, and in a toneless voice announced to them all “I’m not worried about that.”

John Winchester didn’t care about legacy, bloodlines, carrying on the family name. Sam had swayed back at John’s words; Dean knew even then it’d felt like a dismissal, a shrugging-off of the normal life Sam openly pined for and their daddy robbed them of.

There was a colder edge to the way he watched his sons, calculating distance and mass and weighing probability. A certain invasiveness about how he encouraged Dean’s behavior around women with a slap on the back and a box of condoms. A particular unkindness in how he went about the same with Sam and became frustrated when his youngest son showed little or no interest. Something about them bothered their father but Dean could never figure out what it was or how to ask forgiveness for it.

(reflecting on this moment and an adolescence full of ones just like it, it occurs to him that maybe their dad had a wholly different concern, if maybe he’d assumed things about his sons and yet done nothing to correct their course, kept leaving them alone together for weeks at a time even though he might’ve suspected the worst was happening)

(it occurs to him that maybe their daddy should’ve done something anyway, even though he was wrong, even if Dean would _never_ )

.:.

It’s like the thought has driven hooks into his brain. His neural pathways have carved a line straight to this single intrusive idea that isn’t even an idea, he doesn’t want it, _he doesn’t._

.:.

Sam stands too close to him, he stands too close to Sam, it’s hard to tell whose fault it is really. Most days he doesn’t notice and if he does it isn’t a bother, and if someone with a nose too big for their own business points it out Dean has overcome the teenage impulse to shove Sam away from him. He’s replaced it with a new, more natural habit, turning further into his brother’s sphere armed with eye-rolls and selective hearing.

Once natural as breathing, now all he does is notice. Now all it does is bother him.

The bunker is huge, cavernous really. There’s no reason for Sam to be pressed right along his side like velcro, no reason for Dean not having bodily unstuck him from his skin. Sam’s too close to him. Then comes a humid flare of subdermal annoyance when, instead of moving around or asking for Dean to hand something over, Sam just reaches right across him and grabs for it. He’d probably smell Sam’s fucking pit-stains if he focused hard enough. It’s like Sam doesn’t even see him, looking way past him, already nesting up in his own head in that way he’s had ever since fleeing the Cage. He’s too close, too close, way too fucking close-

Dean’s body clenches from the lock of his jaw to the curl of his toes, ready for a fight, muscles tingling, aching to be used.

Sam grabs the tome and returns his giant grabby hands to where they belong.

Dean lets out a breath, too loud, too shaken. _Adrenaline,_ he thinks, ribs that tremble around his emptied lungs, _fight or flight._

Sam looks up with a start, furrow-browed glossy-eyed concern, even goes to put the stupid book down after going to all that trouble grabbing it in the first place, and Dean is. A hair _too_ skittish. He’s jumpy, he knows that, it’s clearly suspicious when he ducks out of Sam’s orbit like he does.

He just needs something to do that’ll keep his hands from shaking like they want to hit something. The absolute last thing he wants to do is hurt Sam because he’s having a moment and doesn’t want to be touched or intruded on or… whatever the hell that was all about.

(whatever that was - as if he hasn’t been overreacting to Sam since they were young, as if he isn’t attuned to every hair and pore and subconscious tic and twitch of Sam’s face, like he hasn’t written the manual of Sam Winchester in ink of his own blood)

The Mark isn’t even bothering him this time, but Dean scratches it anyway, digging his nails around the raised edges like he could just peel it right the hell off.

.:.

He has to swallow his own blood before he can squeeze out the words, “You gotta get outta here before he comes back.” Sam doesn’t want to hear him and that’s okay. He’s dying and these are his last words but it’s okay. He holds the handkerchief to his chest where it does nothing to help, sopping wet and warm with all this life leaking right out of him, and Sam babbles about all these other things that aren’t going to help him either. “Listen to me, it’s better this way.”

“ _What?_ ”

“The Mark, it’s making me into something I don’t want to be.”

Sam gets him onto his feet, echoes of platitudes about how the Mark is a problem for later, and it’s all Dean can do to keep from sitting straight back down again. His puncture, it bleeds, and his body, it’s just _so weak_. The steps he manages to take are small agonies, little deaths, and he really does try, he does. Can’t let Sammy down, can’t leave him alone, who’ll look after him if not Dean?

Who’ll make sure he lives past the end of the week? Who’ll keep him fed and away from the liquor? Who’ll love him in Dean’s stead? Who could possibly do all that he does for his brother?

But every movement feels like he’s being stabbed again, like Metatron’s blade broke off inside him and is shaking loose between the organs that keep him breathing and the organs that keep him bleeding. They don’t get very far at all before he’s asking Sam to hold up.

“I gotta say somethin’ to you,” he says, trying his hardest to pull in a full breath, deep enough to stay alive a few more seconds. He can hardly see past the encroaching dark, a vignette closing in on Sam’s terrified face. Heartbreaking as it is, he’s glad it’s the last thing he’ll see. “I’m proud of us,” he says, and his whole body is starting to sink. He’s not finished, but he knows already no other words are going to come out.

It’s not good enough, he can’t speak the rest, can’t even muster the strength to tell Sam he loves him.

What little he can still make out of his brother is a caricature of grief. The best he can do is press a hand with the weight of stone to the side of Sam’s stricken face, and wherever he ends up he hopes he remembers the glitter of his eyes and the flush of emotion pinking his skin. He tries holding onto the gasping breath Sam takes like he means to say something back but it’s then and there that he quickly fades.

He fades, he dies, and surrenders his body to Sam’s arms. Mortal after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of my favorite songs is Just by Ghostlight Orchestra. It’s a total coincidence, but I listened to it again while editing this chapter and it’s pretty far from the worst fit in the world if anyone’s interested in a song rec!
> 
> Was gonna wait until Thursday to update but since the first few comments were so sweet I felt good about putting this chapter out early. Next chapter should come out over the weekend sometime.


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